Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni man accused of serving in Osama bin Laden's security detail, described conditions at Guantanamo that included the repeated, seemingly incessant interrogations he faced at the hands of U.S. officials. ...A decent nation does not allow a dragnet spying operation that invades individual privacy regardless of probable cause.Naji listed sleep deprivation, humiliation and beatings -- abuses similar to those described as "tantamount to torture" in a 2004 International Committee of the Red Cross report leaked to The New York Times.
Naji also described the painful force-feeding he has been subjected to as he and as many as 100 other prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes to protest their continued detention without charge. ...
Guantanamo detainees -- of which there have been nearly 800 -- were allegedly tortured at the site, drawing widespread international condemnation from human rights and civil liberties advocates who decried the interrogation techniques and the U.S. authority to detain the suspected terrorists without charges.
Nearly all Guantanamo prisoners are being held without charges.
Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House -- and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught. ...A decent nation does not allow a two-tiered justice system.We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government's professed concern with protecting Americans' privacy. It's time to call the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.
Obama's failure to see to it that the laws be faithfully executed has created a culture of impunity that is corrosive to both the government and the culture.
Obama has refused to prosecute George W. Bush and others from that administration for torture, contrary to domestic legal obligations and the UN Convention Against Torture.
Obama admits that torture has occurred and that torture is a war crime. Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, even in light of the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of its torture report, continues to refuse to prosecute those who committed these crimes on the grounds that evidence wasn't sufficient "to obtain and sustain convictions beyond a reasonable doubt."
Frankly, if your Attorney General thinks that he can't convict persons for a crime that they have boasted about committing in a book or on national teevee, then you really ought to fire the guy for prosecutorial incompetence, misfeasance or nonfeasance.
Obama's use of government secrecy and national security claims in a judicial setting amounts to an abuse of power. Obama has abused his office to prevent embarrassing information from becoming public.
A decent nation doesn't occupy its citizens by military force. The US passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, but since the start of the "War on Drugs," the federal government has been performing an end run around the law by militarizing local and state police forces and providing coordination of these forces. Despite congressional complaints and citizen uprisings against police brutality and abuses, Obama is unwilling to stop the distribution of military hardware and training to police forces.
More than just militarizing police under Obama, the military is becoming an ubiquitous presence along with the intelligence apparatus which have infiltrated the American university system:
Since the tragic events of 9/11, state-sanctioned violence and the formative culture that makes it possible has increasingly made its way into higher education. While there is a long history of higher education taking on research funds and projects that serve the military industrial complex, such projects were often hidden from public view. When they did become public, they were often the object of student protests and opposition, especially during the 1960s. What is new today is that more research projects in higher education than ever before are being funded by various branches of the military, but either no one is paying attention or no one seems to care about such projects. Ethical and political considerations about the role of the university in a democratic society have given way to a hyper-pragmatism couched in the language of austerity and largely driven by a decrease in state funding for higher education and the dire lack of jobs for many graduates. ...As research funds dry up for programs aimed at addressing crucial social problems, new opportunities open up with the glut of military funding aimed at creating more
sophisticated weapons, surveillance technologies, and modes of knowledge that connect anthropological concerns with winning wars.Higher education should be one place where young people learn to question the framing mechanisms that allow them both to be turned into producers and consumers of violence and to become increasingly indifferent to matters of social and moral responsibility. Military modes of education largely driven by the demands of war and organized violence are investing heavily in pedagogical practices that train students in various intelligence operations.
The increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis between the military-industrial complex and academia is also on full display the creation of the "Minerva Consortium," ironically named after the goddess of wisdom, whose purpose is to fund various universities to "carry out social sciences research relevant to national security" (Brainard, 2008). As David Price (2010) has brilliantly documented, the CIA and other intelligence agencies "today sneak unidentified students with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms. A new generation of so-called flagship programs have quietly taken root on campuses, and, with each new flagship, our universities are transformed into vessels of the militarized state." As Price (2011) points out, not only is knowledge militarized, but specific disciplines such a anthropology are now weaponized.
Conclusion
So why should the nation demand that Bush and Obama be prosecuted for their actions? Well, because America has a duty to be a good citizen of the world, both to redeem the intent of our founding documents and also from a desire for self-preservation.
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